Rapunzel: The One With The Hair
By Wendy Mass
Read: April 2010
Rating: Sweet
This is a really cute book, best for younger readers. Disney’s new Rapunzel movie, Tangled, is coming out in a year or so, making this a timely choice. It’s told in diary form, which allows the kids to speak like kids.
Rapunzel has grown up with her loving parents, who make a good living growing rampion, a herb people are willing to pay a lot of money for. Her twelfth birthday should be a happy day in early August, but a witch arrives to spirit her away. Rapunzel’s parents made a bargain with the witch before Rapunzel was born, and now they owe her the daughter they were hoping to save. The witch whisks her off to a high tower in the middle of a forest and leaves her there. Rapunzel refuses to stop looking for a way out, despite the witch’s attempts to break her spirit.
Prince Benjamin is thirteen, and not terribly princely. He wear glasses that he’s always breaking or losing, and he isn’t allowed to be a knight because he has to be king one day. He feels the weight of expectation and looming responsibility and he wants to do right by his people… and maybe get a song written about him. With the help of his onerous cousin and a friendly page, Benjamin forms a plan to aid the villagers who live outside the palace. The plan is derailed, and Benjamin finds himself following the sound of a girl singing in the woods–Rapunzel.
From here the story is more faithful to the original tale. I’d forgotten the finer points of the Rapunzel story, but this brought them back. Including the scary bits, which were made gentle here. Benjamin is not blinded, he loses his last pair of glasses–Rapunzel happens to have the other pair he thought he lost.
It’s a nice little book, and it wraps up rather well, except for a few things. The witch hires a sort of gremlin man to cook for and guard Rapunzel. He becomes her friend, and when he escapes he warns others and sets her rescue in motion. But he lives in the attic above her room, and uses a rope to drop down to her. He has free access to enter and leave the tower via a set of stairs. So does the witch. But the witch still uses Rapunzel’s hair as her ladder and apparently planned to from the start, as she has ordered him to put hair-growing spells in the food.
The most amazing factor is that everything happens within the month of August–less than one month, actually. So by the end, Rapunzel and Benjamin have started to crush on each other, but there’s no imminent marriage (or pregnancy!).
Also, wtf is with his mother suddenly deciding that, in light of his rescuing Rapunzel, he shouldn’t have to marry some other random princess? She didn’t even say, “It’s customary for a prince to marry the girl he rescues, so how about we hold off on any other engagements until we settle this.”
Despite the anachronisms and the silly holes, it was very sweet.
